The Pro OC Cup kicked off March 1 as a new competition that features the best and most extreme overclockers from around the world. As the competition is now half-way, let us have a look at what the competition brought so far. The focus of this article is the participants, results and overall standings. Hold on to your desk chair – this is going to be a lot to digest!

The Pro OC Line-up

The new Cup is different from the old Pro OC League. Not only is this competition limited in time with every three months a new one kicking off, it also requires team and participants to actively make the decision to sign up. The registration period started very slowly with only a few teams formed in the first week. On April 1st, the registration closed with an interestingly large amount of teams signed up. Eighteen teams featuring fifty-six overclockers from around the world were ready to compete for the next two months in an attempt to win the first Pro OC Cup title.

The main players of the Pro OC Cup are a combination of all-time legends, known faces with a strong reputation and a couple of new up-and-comers. You can find the full list of all participants at the bottom of this article, but here are a couple of eye-catchers.

All-stars – The most prominent and famous amongst the Pro OC participants are without any doubt those who managed top five in the League in the past. AndreYang from ASUS, K|ngp|n from eVGA and NickShih from ASRock are all former number ones in the old League. We also see Smoke and Slamms from the illustrious OCLab.ru in the line-up, the reigning Pro OC champions. Amongst the all-stars, we of course also count Christian Ney from Switzerland and Corsair Brazil’s Rbuass.

For this first round of the Pro OC Cup, we notice that the all-stars primarily hooked up in three teams: KPC Pro OC (k|ngp|n, AndreYang, Splave.ROM, NickShih, Christian Ney), United Overclockers (SF3D, Xtreme Addict, giorgioprimo, Rbuass) and OCLab.ru (slamms, Smoke). Over time, we expect the teams to splinter off into multiple smaller teams.

Interesting prospects – Perhaps in a more obvious manner than the old League previously allowed, we distinguish a couple of interesting prospects amongst the Pro OC competitors. First of all, the winners of last year’s MSI MOA Grand Final, Littleboy and OC_WindForce from South Korea. Together with NameGT, they formed the NP2Korea Pro OC team and currently rank eight out of eighteen. Another interesting team is without any doubt the Kronos Pro OC team featuring the second overclocker from South-America Nacho_arroyo as well as Phil, Patriot, FirekillerGR and Rsannino. This team of non-industry related overclockers is currently holding the third place overall thanks to Patriot holding the number one in the Cinebench R11.5 stage.

Amongst the other teams, we find a couple of Pro OC teams linked to hardware tech sites. OCN Pro represents Overclock.net, Overclockers Pro OC represents Overclockers.com and Lucky_n00b is holding the fort for the Indonesian review site Jagatreview.

As mentioned earlier, you can find a full list of the participants and the teams they bench for at the bottom of this article.

The Results

So far, the Pro OC Cup counts 164 results. The benchmark scores are a mix of new tops and previous highs, as the rules allow a combination of new and old results. Let us have a look at the current top results.

Stage 1 – Memory Clock

In the memory clock frequency stage, KPC Pro OC is leading before KPC Pro OC #2 and OCLab.ru with a frequency of 1863 MHz (DDR3-3726). This feat was obviously accomplished by Memory Guru Christian Ney using an AMD Llano A8-3870K processor, GSKILL RipjawZ memory and GIGABYTE A75-UD4H motherboard. For both the CPU and the memory liquid nitrogen cooling was used.

Stage 2 – Single GPU 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme

Just like in the first stage, KPC Pro OC is holding the number one spot in the second stage. That is not a surprise, however, with Nvidia-favourite K|ngp|n in the line-up. Rbuass from Brazil, benching for the United Overclockers team, is so far the only person who is able to get relatively close to The K|ng. After a series of backup and re-benched submissions, only seventy-two (72) points currently separate the two. Whether either of the two Titan ‘clockers are sitting on backup results is a question only they can answer. We will probably have to wait for a third contender to know the answer.

The other teams still have to fire up their first GTX Titan under liquid nitrogen and it seems that the sheer cost of the fastest single GPU might be a very limiting factor. Seems like a great opportunity for a vendor to jump in and see if a sponsorship can help out the teams.

Stage 3 – SuperPI 32M

And yes, the KPC Pro OC team is leading the third stage of the Pro OC Cup. With a CPU frequency of 7063MHz, AndreYang currently holds the record for SuperPI 32M and it can be of no surprise that he is also leading in this stage. Closest contender in this stage is, again, United Overclockers. SF3D – currently holding the third fastest ever SuperPI 32M result – is however not as close as his teammate Rbuass is in the second stage. Three seconds is the gap with the number one – a short time to finish breakfast cereal but an era in SuperPI time. In case you did not see it, the current number two overall is Splave, AndreYang’s teammate.

In total, eight teams managed to get below the five-minute mark, with the top five even below the four minute fifty second mark. To get below that barrier, you need a Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge clocked at around 6.8GHz! Many of the scores are personal bests and we cannot wait to see more teams go below 4 minute 50 as the competition moves forward.

Stage 4 – 3DMark11 Performance Full Out

Yeah, yeah. KPC Pro OC. Interestingly enough, the KPC Pro OC #2 team – the “junior” team of the big KPC Pro OC – with Gunslinger taking the lead for the team in this stage managed to force its bigger brother to bring out their top score of 37,000+ points. As K|npg|n was holding the highest position, Gunslinger managed to beat his score of 35,210 by a mere 18 points. High enough for AndreYang to pull out the Quad-SLI monster system featuring four of the most hard-core modified GTX Titan graphics cards. Yes, it is an expensive system but apart from the cost, it is the hardware modifications that are so impressive. Good luck, Gunslinger!

Putting the GTX Titan configurations aside, we see United Overclockers in third place with a Quad-CFX Radeon HD 7970 setup. Xtreme Addict from Poland holds that place with an impressive 5.7GHz Core i7 3930K and 4 7970s clocked at 1400+ MHz core frequency. Enough to bring the team 36 points in this stage.

Further down the rankings, we find more GTX Titan and Radeon HD 7970-based configurations. It is very clear: the key for this stage is GTX Titans, on liquid nitrogen with heavily modified PWM. A real man’s test!

Stage 5 – Cinebench R11.5

The fifth and last stage of the Pro OC Cup is a bit of an unusual one. Cinebench R11.5 requires a multi-processor configuration and seems to be dominated by AMD! With systems currently still cooled by regular air, it is the motherboard and the VRM in particular that is taking the hardest hits in this stage. Not once have we heard Kronos Pro OC’s Patriot, the currently leader, and Knopflerbruce state they are going to troubles securing the board from “blowing up”. Four processors producing well over 200W of power each, that sure requires engineering. The competition seems to be going in a direct confrontation between AMD’s Magny-Cours and Intel’s Sandy Bridge-EP technology with the AMD having the advantage of being overclockable. At least, the engineering samples are.

In the middle segment of the stage ranking, we find more teams sporting dual processor configurations as well as a couple of single CPU platforms. In the dual processor category, we find United Overclockers on top with SF3D’s number two 2xCPU overall Xeon E5 2687W system clocked at 3.6GHz up from 3.1GHz. As the Intel Xeon processors are locked, he had to increase the BCLK frequency to 106MHz. Not a bad overclock for a server board! With this stage, United Overclockers secure sixth place.

As for the single processor configurations, we find Metalracer from Bench Warmers Enter The Game. His Core i7 3930K clocked at 5538.4 currently holds the third place in the 6xCPU Cinebench ranking and gives the team tenth place for this stage.

Conclusive lines

The competition is heading towards the first elimination, which takes place on May 15 and prevents any teams out of the top-10 to continue in the Pro OC Cup. After the elimination, two weeks are left for the teams to decide who will take the title of the first Pro OC Cup. It currently looks like the all-star team of KPC Pro OC, formed by three industry overclockers will grab the win. Second and third place are still somewhat open as United Overclockers, Kronos Pro OC and KPC Pro OC #2 define themselves within a twelve-point spread. The other positions are still wide open and will most likely be decided in the last days before elimination. We look forward to be surprise by an outsider, though. As we all know: every competition has its surprise!

At the bottom of the ranking, we find the Spanish OCXLab.es and other mostly single player teams. Although it is too soon to tell, it does seem that the Pro OC Cup favours teams that have all five seats filled so it is definitely not going to be easy for the solo players to make the cut in one month. Nevertheless, we wish each and every one of them the best of luck!

As for the sponsors, we can share with you that we have added twenty-nine logos to the Pro OC Team pages so far. Most of the sponsors are hardware vendors supplying the teams with hardware. ASUS and Corsair seem to be making the most of the free exposure opportunity, each supporting four teams, followed by AMD, Der8auer and GSKILL each supporting three teams. As HWBOT does not arrange sponsorships directly, it is up to the teams to find partners to provide the necessary support for this competition.

To end the article with, here is an overview of all the teams and participants.

3 year and 8 months ago –
So far sponsorship is a total failure cause none company sponsors "PRO CUP" or a team but all those signs are "pinned" by ocers who have private support/relation with a vendor :D